DemoRazza

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The General Directorate for Demography and Race ( Italian : Direzione generale per la Demografia e la Razza ) for short DemoRazza was the central control point of the fascist Italian racial policy. It was formed in July 1938 in the Italian Ministry of the Interior from the former Demography Directorate shortly after the publication of the Manifesto of Racist Scientists . Your new Divisione Razza (Race Department) was responsible for the development and enforcement of the Italian race legislation including the implementation provisions. The traditional tasks of the Divisione Demografica (demography department) and the Divisione Premi (premium department for birth promotion) took a back seat.

Institutional Aspects

The general directors of the DemoRazza Antonio De Pera until the summer of 1942, followed by Lorenzo La Via, were subordinate to Guido Buffarini Guidi until February 1943 and then Umberto Albini, each representing the nominal Minister of the Interior Mussolini . The Race Department included about forty employees who were numerically more career officials than ideological anti-Semites. They were responsible for the supervision, interpretation and implementation of the Italian racial laws and the support of the racial policy, whereby they were dependent on the cooperation with the local police authorities ( Questura ) and the prefectures . The lack of a larger, strictly anti-Semitic administrative unit represented a great difference to the anti-Semitic model of the German SS and similar groups in other countries. Italian fascism, led by Duce Mussolini , was also influenced by the Roman Catholic Church and King Victor Emmanuel III less totalitarian than Germany under Hitler or the Soviet Union under Stalin . More often than not, the DemoRazza was unable to prevail against the reluctance and resistance of some ministries and local authorities. This made the Italian racial legislation appear erroneously less strict in international comparison.

The central race law of November 17, 1938 on measures for the defense of the Italian race , which was significantly influenced by Mussolini and Guido Buffarini Guidi, pursued competing goals in the definition of the Jews, left cases of doubt in the determination of race, offered the Aryanization of people by a race court ( Tribunale della Razza ) and provided for numerous transitional regulations for deserving Jews ( discriminazione ). This created a need for regulation and tightening possibilities at the administrative level. The catalog of laws and ordinances was expanded almost every week until 1943.

On March 15, 1944 Giovanni Preziosi became inspector general for race affairs ( Ispettore Generale per la Razza ) of the Italian Social Republic with his own race office based in Desenzano del Garda . On April 16, 1944, the DemoRazza was stripped of its non-demographic competencies and renamed the General Directorate for Demography.

activities

Census of Jews

In August 1938 the Jews were recorded in two steps. First, through the collection of old and current membership lists of Jewish organizations, a more religious and culturally defined Judaism was recorded. In addition, the DemoRazza had the provincial prefectures list all racial Jews until August 22, 1938. The result was 47,252 Jews of Italian nationality and 10,173 foreign Jews out of a total Italian population of 45 million.

Internment and Labor Service

At the beginning of the war, according to the situation report of February 9, 1940, the DemoRazza had over 10,000 requests from stateless or foreign Jews to remain in Italy, of which only around 2,000 had been completed. These foreign Jews, like members of enemy states, were included in the internment concept. On May 11, 1942, DemoRazza circular 31999 ordered the introduction of compulsory labor service for all Jews between the ages of 18 and 55. The implementation failed because these workers were not really usable and profitable and a mass deployment as in the German coercive system was not numerically possible.

literature

  • Renzo De Felice : The Jews in Fascist Italy . Enigma 2001, ISBN 1-929631-01-4 .
  • Michael A. Livingston: The Facists and the Jews of Italy - Mussolini's Race Laws, 1938-1943 . Cambridge University Press 2014, ISBN 978-1-107-02756-5 .
  • Carlo Moos: Exclusion, Internment, Deportation - Anti-Semitism and Violence in Late Italian Fascism (1938-1945) . Chronos 2004, ISBN 3-0340-0641-1 .
  • Michele Sarfatti : La Repubblica sociale italiana a Desenzano: Giovanni Preziosi e l'Ispettorato generale per la razza. La Giuntina, Florence 2008, ISBN 978-88-8057-301-2 .
  • Thomas Schlemmer and Hans Woller: Italian Fascism and the Jews 1922 to 1945 pdf. Quarterly issues for contemporary history 2005, issue 2, p. 181 ff.
  • Gabriele Schneider: Mussolini in Africa - The fascist racial policy in the Italian colonies 1936-1941 . SH-Verlag 2000, ISBN 3-89498-093-1 .
  • Susan Zuccotti : The Italian Racial Laws, 1938-1943 published in: The Fate of the European Jews 1939-1945 . Ed .: Jonathan Frankel, Oxford University Press 1997, ISBN 0-19-511931-2 , p. 133 ff.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Schlemmer and Hans Woller: Italian Fascism and the Jews 1922 to 1945 . P. 180
  2. ^ Carlo Moos: Exclusion, Internment, Deportation - Anti-Semitism and Violence in Late Italian Fascism (1938-1945) . P. 40
  3. ^ Michael A. Livingston: The Facists and the Jews of Italy - Mussolini's Race Laws, 1938-1943 . P. 20 f.
  4. ↑ Document VEJ 14/13 in: Sara Berger u. a. (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945 (collection of sources) Volume 14: Occupied Southeast Europe and Italy . Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-055559-2 , pp. 152–158.
  5. ^ Michael A. Livingston: The Facists and the Jews of Italy - Mussolini's Race Laws, 1938-1943 . P. 23
  6. ↑ Thomas Schlemmer and Hans Woller: Italian Fascism and the Jews 1922 to 1945 . P. 182
  7. ^ Carlo Moos: Exclusion, Internment, Deportation - Anti-Semitism and Violence in Late Italian Fascism (1938-1945) . P. 212 (note 155)
  8. ^ Renzo De Felice : The Jews in Fascist Italy . P. 601 (note 1196)
  9. ^ Susan Zuccotti: The Italian Racial Laws, 1938-1943 . P. 135
  10. ^ Carlo Moos: Exclusion, Internment, Deportation - Anti-Semitism and Violence in Late Italian Fascism (1938-1945) . P. 76 ff.
  11. ^ Carlo Moos: Exclusion, Internment, Deportation - Anti-Semitism and Violence in Late Italian Fascism (1938-1945) . P. 69 ff.